Kiekie (photo) Safari: Old cars, September 2014

Last weekend our camera club arranged what we called a Kiekie Safari. This time one of our club members arranged for the members of the Bloemfontein Camera Club to visit a collector of old cars. Just some more information on a Kiekie safari:

All interested members met each other at the venue at an agreed time – this time it was at 07H00 Saturday morning. Then the organizer of the Kiekie safari hands out a list of categories/topics. The photographers must then go out and take photos that fit into these categories. Once the categories were reviewed and explained, the photographers can go and enjoy themselves. Like they said in the Army: “Op jou eie tyd en op jou eie teiken”. There is usually no time limit and photographers can move around as they wish. Afterwards the photographers will review all their images at home, select and process/develop one or two images for each category. Then a meeting is organized where all the photos are uploaded (per category) unto a laptop and projected via a projector. Each photographer can vote for one photo per category and the photo with the most votes is the winner of the category. Lots of fun!!!

For this safari we had ten categories and we had to select and enter two photos in each category. This type of photography is a real challenge for me as a nature and wildlife photographer. With nature photography, it is all about anticipation and patience. You need to position yourself according to the anticipated action and wait for the action to happen. With this type of photography, it is all about creativity. One needs to think about your photos and dig deep for ideas. The cars were also parked in garages close to each other making creative think even more difficult. But at the end of day, it was fun and yet another learning curve.

My approach is to read through the categories once and then just go about and look for something interesting. Only when I exhausted all my creativity will I look again at the list to see what I’ve missed. I exhausted my creativity around 09h15 on that Saturday morning, looked again at the list of categories and decided to call it a day even though I did not manage to get images for all ten categories. Here are the ten categories and my images:

Once you arrive at the scene of a kiekie safari/shoot, people tend to feel very intimidate especially if it is something new. And for me as a newbie in photography – something I am not familiar with (something I need to capture that is out of my comfort zone). How about this piece of advice:

Be inspire, not intimidated!

I find it to be one of the hardest things to overcome since I’ve taken up photography – intimidation. I tend to think about other photographers’ images and use to tell myself that my work will not be up to standard. Totally wrong approach because it should be about your individual style and how can you capture a specific scene and it is not about the style of other photographers. Just remember, the images your are comparing yourself with could be a result of hours of hard work, determination and could even be the results of a photographer looking at the scene from a totally different perspective. So:

Just go out and use your own creativity, enjoy capturing the moment and forget about how the other photographers will capture the particular scene.